Current status

This feature originally proposed the removal of HAL from the Fedora Desktop spin. This goal has already been accomplished and we also completed the removal from the Fedora DVD. In the meantime, hal package maintainer deprecated it for Fedora 16, and later it was also blocked from composes. So this feature is tracking the complete removal of HAL from the distribution.

GnomeVFS has been deprecated since 2008, applications should use gvfs instead. Since >80 other packages still depend on gnome-vfs2, its HAL support was disabled (Fedora bug 698638), as was recently done also by Debian (Debian bug 599020), but the goal is to get rid of GnomeVFS too.

Benefit to Fedora

Scope

Loads of applications require HAL itself, or libhal. Applications should not rely on HAL, or libhal being available.

How To Test

Need to test:

yum remove hal-filesystem hal-libs

Check that nothing gets removed because it depends on hal

Check that applications that access hardware still work as before

User Experience

Faster boot-up

Possibly faster applications startup when switching from libhal to libgudev for device enumeration

Dependencies

See description

Contingency Plan

Undeprecate hal.

Documentation

N/A

Release Notes

HAL, a hardware abstraction layer which has been a deprecated component for several releases, has been completely removed from Fedora. Software components using HAL have moved over to using udisks and upower as well as libudev for device discovery. This results in faster system bootup and faster startup for applications depending on device discovery.